Cummings a KGB target? He was more interested in vodka!
AN AMERICAN businessman who employed Dominic Cummings in Russia in the 1990s has scotched wild claims that the Downing Street aide was recruited as a Russian spy, saying his fondness for vodka made him a very unlikely target.
Boris Johnson’s right-hand man spent three years in Russia from 1994 to 1997 working for Adam Dixon, a US entrepreneur who was attempting to build an airline in the post-Soviet state.
Earlier this month, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry wrote a bizarre letter to the Government demanding Mr Cummings’s time in Russia be investigated as someone had told her of their ‘serious concerns’ that he was a spy.
Mr Dixon laughed off the idea, branding it ‘very strange’. He said: ‘You would have had to be very perceptive back then to have spotted Dominic as a great talent. I was fond of him at that time. I was much more worried that he was going to be a train wreck.’
He told The Times that Mr Cummings was ‘an ardent student’ of the Communist revolution, and was prone to swigging vodka from the bottle, adding: ‘There were a lot of young people like Dominic who were fascinated by what was going on [in Russia at the time] and as a result were there. He was sort of panhandling for a job and that’s why he ended up with me. It didn’t go very well.’
Mr Dixon said it was extremely unlikely anyone in Russia would have thought to target Mr Cummings as a future asset due to the pro-Western policies pursued at the time by President Boris Yeltsin and the widespread disruption after the collapse of the USSR. Mr Dixon said: ‘He definitely drank too much and was obstinate and could be self-defeating and harmful to getting a business going properly. If somebody had spotted him then as a talent that was inevitably going to work its way to the top, I would have been very surprised. ‘He is too much of a patriot/chauvinist and too independent to be a mere spy. Even back then Dominic was very consistent that the UK should have absolute independence.’